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Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software
Living in a networked world means never really getting to decide in any thoroughgoing way who or what enters your “space” (your laptop, your iPhone, your thermostat . . . your home). With this as a basic frame-of-reference, James J. Brown’s Ethical Programs examines and explores the rhetorical potential and problems of a hospitality ethos suited to a new era of hosts and guests. Brown reads a range of computational strategies and actors, from the general principles underwriting the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which determines how packets of information can travel through the internet, to the Obama election campaign’s use of the power of protocols to reach voters, harvest their data, incentivize and, ultimately, shape their participation in the campaign. In demonstrating the kind of rhetorical spaces networked software establishes and the access it permits, prevents, and molds, Brown makes a significant contribution to the emergent discourse of software studies as a major component of efforts in broad fields including media studies, rhetorical studies, and cultural studies.
248 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2015
About the author
James J. Brown
17 books1 followerHon. James J. Brown presides over Administrative hearings in Raleigh,NC. He is the author of the novel "Will The Laughter Stop? BABY BOOMER CHRONICLES" from Author House Publishing. See: www.authorhouse.com. He is also a best selling legal author and editor. See: www.aspenpublishers.com"
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January 20, 2016
This is a remarkable book that draws connections between, as its subtitle suggests, the fields of rhetoric and software studies. Brown draws his sense of ethics from Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, particularly the notion of "hospitality" explored in Derrida's Of Hospitality. In short, Derrida suggests a tension between the singular Law of hospitality and the laws (plural) of hospitality. The former is a principle, an ideal. The Law of hospitality demands that everyone is included, that all would-be guests are granted entrance and extended hospitality. The laws of hospitality are the contingent provisions that limit and enact hospitality. Without laws, policies that delimit it and enforce it, the law remains an inconsequential abstraction. But without the law, the laws have no principle to guide them.
Brown takes up this tension in the realm of software and computer programs, and he notes the ways in which such programs an often positioned (by Levinas, for example) as decidedly unethical. That is, machines and programs are unethical, according to Levinas, because they cannot decide. They cannot navigate ethical tensions because they can only respond in preordained ways. Machines don't respond, they simply react. But Brown notes all the ways in which software, programs, and digital platforms (e.g., TCP/IP, social media, the software behind Wikipedia) are constantly adapting and adapted, making decisions in concert with and separate from human programmers. Which packets of data are granted safe passage and which are refused entry? Brown is not interested in establishing an "ethical program" that would resolve the tension between the law and laws of hospitality: "Whereas an ethical program might conjure images of a set of rules by which we determine what behavior is more or less ethical, the programs I present here do not always lay out a plan or a series of criteria for judging what is or is not ethical. Instead, these ethical programs are incomplete, temporary attempts to address the difficult question of hospitality" (18). He focuses on three prepositions to describe how we might engage the "rhetorics of software: arguing about software, arguing with software, and arguing in software" (17). That "with," I should note, doesn't just suggest that we can argue via software, but that software can be a sort of interlocutor with which we argue.
Brown's first chapter is entitled "Web Hosting: Hospitality and Ethical Programs," the very fact that we call it "web hosting" suggesting how bound up digital spaces are with questions of hospitality. As Brown puts it, "The Internet, in its very structure and in its potential, embodies the two poles of hospitality: absolute, unconditional hospitality and calculating, cold hospitality" (25). He begins by noting a case in 2010 when a spam text message foiled a suicide bomber by causing her vest to detonate prematurely. In that case, a message came through, a sort of arrival that was not anticipated. Brown also notes the way this story and other information circulates on the social networking site Twitter, presenting Twitter's networks as an example of questions of hospitality.
His second chapter takes up Ian Bogost's concept of "procedural rhetoric," putting it in conversation with the digital, procedural infrastructure of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. He emphasizes the ways in which the procedural message of campaigns can conflict with the constative messages forwarded by candidates and their supporters. The third chapter turns to what Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker call "the exploit." Specifically, Brown focuses on two exploits that drew attention to weaknesses in Twitter's security protocols: the onMouseover and OAuth exploits. He asks who was involved in both the enactment of these exploits (the "hack") and the deliberations and debates that they generated (the "yack"), posing these as questions of hospitality. He also puts exploits in conversation with rhetoric's historical and theoretical emphasis on possibility. He cites Nancy Struever, who claims that "rhetoric is defined by its mode of possibility, its continuing hospitality to approaches to problems. This is an ethical stance," Brown argues (79). And, moreover, it's an open-ended stance that is in many ways at work in the logic of exploits. (On a totally personal note: given my interests, this was the chapter I got the most excited about.)
Brown then turns to the way the rhetorical notion of ethos, meaning the character of speakers as well as "dwelling." He explores how ethos functions differently on two online encyclopedias: Citizendium and Wikipedia, both of which are based on a software called MediaWiki. He focuses specifically on the scandal surrounding a Wikipedia editor, Essjay, whose "real life" identity and qualifications turned out to be different than those he claimed on Wikipedia. Brown uses the "two iterations" of MediaWiki covered in the chapter to show readers "how software can be adapted to different ethical programs, but ... also demonstrate how the platform often holds stubbornly to its own agendas" (133). Finally, he focuses on robot writers programmed to write narrative coverage of baseball games based on the database of information provided in box scores. Brown uses these writers to question Lev Manovich's distinction between narrative and database. Rhetoric, Brown argues, "is concerned not only with the output of machines (text, image, and so on) but also with the machines themselves. Rhetoric, even in its predigital permutations, is concerned with the machines that machine discourse. That is, rhetoric cuts across the concerns of database and narrative" (139-140).
Brown concludes by returning to the ways we argue about, with, and in software, and questioning the distinction between programs and ethical decision-making. "The future of ethical programs," he writes, "requires a continuous vigilance ... that insists upon constant reexamination of the laws.... The laws, even those enacted by computational machines, will always be haunted by the Law. This possibility is our only justification for the hope that any ethical program--computational or otherwise--has a future" (184).
Brown takes up this tension in the realm of software and computer programs, and he notes the ways in which such programs an often positioned (by Levinas, for example) as decidedly unethical. That is, machines and programs are unethical, according to Levinas, because they cannot decide. They cannot navigate ethical tensions because they can only respond in preordained ways. Machines don't respond, they simply react. But Brown notes all the ways in which software, programs, and digital platforms (e.g., TCP/IP, social media, the software behind Wikipedia) are constantly adapting and adapted, making decisions in concert with and separate from human programmers. Which packets of data are granted safe passage and which are refused entry? Brown is not interested in establishing an "ethical program" that would resolve the tension between the law and laws of hospitality: "Whereas an ethical program might conjure images of a set of rules by which we determine what behavior is more or less ethical, the programs I present here do not always lay out a plan or a series of criteria for judging what is or is not ethical. Instead, these ethical programs are incomplete, temporary attempts to address the difficult question of hospitality" (18). He focuses on three prepositions to describe how we might engage the "rhetorics of software: arguing about software, arguing with software, and arguing in software" (17). That "with," I should note, doesn't just suggest that we can argue via software, but that software can be a sort of interlocutor with which we argue.
Brown's first chapter is entitled "Web Hosting: Hospitality and Ethical Programs," the very fact that we call it "web hosting" suggesting how bound up digital spaces are with questions of hospitality. As Brown puts it, "The Internet, in its very structure and in its potential, embodies the two poles of hospitality: absolute, unconditional hospitality and calculating, cold hospitality" (25). He begins by noting a case in 2010 when a spam text message foiled a suicide bomber by causing her vest to detonate prematurely. In that case, a message came through, a sort of arrival that was not anticipated. Brown also notes the way this story and other information circulates on the social networking site Twitter, presenting Twitter's networks as an example of questions of hospitality.
His second chapter takes up Ian Bogost's concept of "procedural rhetoric," putting it in conversation with the digital, procedural infrastructure of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. He emphasizes the ways in which the procedural message of campaigns can conflict with the constative messages forwarded by candidates and their supporters. The third chapter turns to what Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker call "the exploit." Specifically, Brown focuses on two exploits that drew attention to weaknesses in Twitter's security protocols: the onMouseover and OAuth exploits. He asks who was involved in both the enactment of these exploits (the "hack") and the deliberations and debates that they generated (the "yack"), posing these as questions of hospitality. He also puts exploits in conversation with rhetoric's historical and theoretical emphasis on possibility. He cites Nancy Struever, who claims that "rhetoric is defined by its mode of possibility, its continuing hospitality to approaches to problems. This is an ethical stance," Brown argues (79). And, moreover, it's an open-ended stance that is in many ways at work in the logic of exploits. (On a totally personal note: given my interests, this was the chapter I got the most excited about.)
Brown then turns to the way the rhetorical notion of ethos, meaning the character of speakers as well as "dwelling." He explores how ethos functions differently on two online encyclopedias: Citizendium and Wikipedia, both of which are based on a software called MediaWiki. He focuses specifically on the scandal surrounding a Wikipedia editor, Essjay, whose "real life" identity and qualifications turned out to be different than those he claimed on Wikipedia. Brown uses the "two iterations" of MediaWiki covered in the chapter to show readers "how software can be adapted to different ethical programs, but ... also demonstrate how the platform often holds stubbornly to its own agendas" (133). Finally, he focuses on robot writers programmed to write narrative coverage of baseball games based on the database of information provided in box scores. Brown uses these writers to question Lev Manovich's distinction between narrative and database. Rhetoric, Brown argues, "is concerned not only with the output of machines (text, image, and so on) but also with the machines themselves. Rhetoric, even in its predigital permutations, is concerned with the machines that machine discourse. That is, rhetoric cuts across the concerns of database and narrative" (139-140).
Brown concludes by returning to the ways we argue about, with, and in software, and questioning the distinction between programs and ethical decision-making. "The future of ethical programs," he writes, "requires a continuous vigilance ... that insists upon constant reexamination of the laws.... The laws, even those enacted by computational machines, will always be haunted by the Law. This possibility is our only justification for the hope that any ethical program--computational or otherwise--has a future" (184).
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